Where It Began(80)

“Well,” Mrs. Hewlett says, looking up from the orphan quadruped stowed in her bag. “I have a question, which is, how long have you had this picture, Hewbo?”

Huey looks completely miserable. “When the time stamp says. That’s when I took it.”

“You’re telling me you’ve had this picture since April and you didn’t think to bring it to us or the police because . . .”

At the sound of the word “police” Agnes starts hyperventilating and Mr. Piersol’s body seems to gain uncharacteristic muscle tone. This is when Mr. Piersol suspends everybody in the room. He looks very proud of himself.

You can tell that Huey is having to sit on his hands to restrain himself from taking a picture.

Huey’s mom, who has abandoned all pretense of paying attention, now has a mole sitting in her lap unraveling her loosely knit angora sweater with its tiny paws.

“I just don’t get it,” John says, not even slurred, from the back of the room. “If Gabby wasn’t suspended when we thought she was driving the car, why is she suspended now that you know it was her boyfriend who was driving?”

Mr. Piersol looks perplexed, possibly because he’s never heard a complete, unslurred sentence from my dad before, and possibly because the sentence—the sentence with my dad defending me—makes so much sense.

“What I don’t understand, Hewbo,” Madeleine Hewlett says, “is how you could have let your friend take the blame when you knew she didn’t do it.”

At which point Huey and everybody else in the room who is under eighteen recites in unison, “I thought she knew.”

I am already on my way out of the room when Mrs. Hewlett says, “I still don’t understand. Why on Earth would you think that?”





LXXII


I RUN INTO THE TEACHERS’ HANDICAP BATHROOM near the college counselor’s office, the only place at Winston School where you can lock the door and actually be alone. I turn on the water and the fan and then I wait to start crying, but I don’t. Weeks of crying like a total slob, and now there’s nothing left.

I stare at myself in the teachers’ handicap bathroom mirror, and I look so strange and so not like myself in all that opaque makeup. Clearly, it’s time for something new, but the thing is, I have no idea what new thing that will be.

I put my hands under the cold water and I splash it on my face, not really thinking about it, and the makeup starts to dissolve in sticky clumps. I start to wipe it off, a little at a time, until there are patches of naked skin, mostly beige, some not, some still turning the colors skin turns after it gets pummeled by an imploding car, air bags, and a eucalyptus tree. I look like myself, only slightly bruised. Which is to say: I look like myself.

Someone is banging on the door and I think that unless it’s a desperate handicapped person (which, if Winston had one, I would know about it) then it’s an extremely rude person who should go away, which I semi-nicely tell them to do.

“But it’s Lisa!” she shouts over the fan and the running water.

“Go away!”

“Let me in!” If she doesn’t stop, she is going to attract attention and pretty soon there will be a platoon of helpful teachers helping her break down the door, which I crack open, and she squeezes in and turns the lock.

“What happened?” she says. “I was looking for you and I saw you running.” You can tell she’s looking at my face, at the bruises, trying not to. Trying to lock her eyes into eye-contact-only mode, an eye-lock that won’t let them wander along my purple cheekbone and into the hollow of my yellow cheek.

“Well, I might be suspended. Or not. Everybody might be suspended. Or not. They were still duking it out when I left.”

“Does that hurt?”

“Yeah. Only when you touch it.”

“How did I not know this was going on under your makeup?” she says.

I say, “I don’t know,” but I kind of do. Then we just stare at me in the mirror some more.

“I was just thinking, Billy did this to me. He got drunk and he stuck me in the car and he didn’t put a seat belt on me and he drove me into a tree. I just wanted to look at it. I never think about that part of it but here I am, and I’m such a pathetic loser, I hate him but I still somewhat want him.”

There is something about saying it out loud that makes it worse but also better.

Lisa rolls her eyes. “Maybe you’re just in love with the idea of him.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s his body.”

Then we both start to laugh and Lisa flushes the toilet just to raise the noise level in there to drown us out because we can’t stop.

“I am so lame.”

“Totally pathetic,” she agrees, pulling out her stick concealer because my purse is in my locker. “You want some of this?”

“You know, I’m good,” I say.

“You don’t even know how good,” she says. “That’s why I was looking for you. You have someplace to go.”

“Even if I’m not suspended, someplace out of Winston, that’s for sure.”

“Way not to be pathetic. Drop out of school. Perfect.”

“As long as dropping out doesn’t violate the terms of my impending probation and get me thrown in juvie, I am seriously out of here.”